Natural Editing and Recognition of UML Class Diagrams
Tracy Hammond, Kalani Oshiro, Randy Davis · 2001
The Problem: Sketching is a natural andintegral part of software design. Software developers use sketching to aid in the brainstorming of ideas, visualizing programming organization, and understanding of requirements. Unfortunately, when it comes to coding the system, the drawings are left behind. We see natural sketch recognition as a way to bridge that gap. Motivation: We have selected UMLdiagrams because they are a de facto standard for depicting software applications. Within UML we focused on class diagrams, first because of their central role in describing program structure, and second because many of the symbols used in class diagrams are quite similar, and hence, they offer an interesting challenge for sketch recognition. Previous Work: Work at Berkeley by Hse [3] has shown that users prefer a single-stroke sketch-based user interface to a mouse-and-palette based tool for UML design. One company [2] has developed a gesture based diagramming tool, Ideogramic UML, TMwhich allows users to sketch UML diagrams. The tool is based on a graffiti-like implementation and requires users to draw each gesture in one stroke, and in the direction and style as specified by the user manual. As a consequence, some of the gestures drawnonly loosely resemble the output glyph. For example, ϕ is the stroke used to indicate an actor, drawn by the system as a stick figure.